Episode Archive

Those who read a lot of short stories have probably read a few by Daniel Orozco. Yet he hasn't had a collection published until now. He has the ingredients of a fine writer -- a healthy imagination for characters, a skill at spinning a tale, and a command of the language that should make most people jealous. He'll talk with us about how he writes, the status of the short story today, whether it's possible to teach creative writing, and he'll read from two stories that are so different you won't believe they were written by the same man.

In part two of today's Between the Covers host Ed Goldberg speaks with Portland writer Trevor Richardson about his debut novel "American Bastards," a surreal novel of self-discovery and hipster culture. In this novel a number of dead rock stars try to save the world, a hitchhiking Uncle Sam heads to Hollywood, New York City is invaded by the restless dead, and more. We are the bastard children of the American Dream.

What do you have when there is a dead body floating near a pier, open warfare between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and a cast of characters that add to the mystery of "The Murder of the Century"?

Dan Johnson interviews Portland writer, Paul Collins, about his latest thriller, a small book that packs a big punch.

Host Marianne Barisonek interviews Portland writer, television host and robotics engineer Daniel Wilson, author of the technothriller "Robopocalypse," which explores the fate of the human race following a robot uprising.

Wilson has an M.S. and P.H.D. in Robotics, and an M.S. in Machine Learning. His other books include the 2005 book "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion," "Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived," "How To Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Aliens, Ninjas, and Zombies," and "The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahaha!"

Host Robyn Shanti interviews Steve Earle, musician, actor, and writer about his first novel, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, named after a Hank Williams song.. The novel is set in San Antonio in 1963, and tells the story of a defrocked doctor and morphine addict. The doctor makes a living by performing illegal abortions and is haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams, with whom he was traveling when Williams died of an overdose.

The guest is Portland writer Bill Deresiewicz, author of A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter.

When Bill Deresiewicz was forced to read Jane Austen in graduate school, he discovered that Austen was perhaps the one writer who could teach him how to be a better person. We'll hear why.

William Deresiewicz was an associate professor of English at Yale University until 2008 and is a widely published literary critic who writes for a popular audience. His reviews and criticism regularly appear in The New Republic, The Nation, The American Scholar, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times. In 2008 he was nominated for a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

Host Marianne Barisonek interviews Geraldine Brooks, best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for March) about her new book, CALEB’S CROSSING, which was inspired by the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Brooks first learned about him during her time as a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard in 2006. Caleb was from the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans who lived on Martha’s Vineyard. There is little official information on Caleb’s life and Brooks’s novel is an informed imagining of what he might have gone through.

Ann Crittenden talks about the 10th anniversary of her bestselling book "The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued." Ann shows how mothers are systematically disadvantaged and made dependent by a society that exploits those who perform its most critical work. Although women have been liberated, mothers have not.

The guest is Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the United States, and author of the new book, "The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them." Pacelle will discuss the deep links of the human-animal bond as wll as the conflicting implulses that have led us to betray this bond through widespread and systemic cruelty to animals.

Wayne Pacelle has been with the Humane Society of the U.S. for seventeen years. He has taken a special interest in law reform and has been a leading strategist in getting animal protection laws enacted by the direct action of the electorate.

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Host Ed Goldberg interviews Sara Gruen, author of Ape House, a satire on science, media, protest, and the relationship with our closest non-human cousins. The novel was inspired by the bonobos and scientific research at Great Ape Trust in Des Moines.

Sara Gruen lives with her husband and three children in an environmentalist community outside of Chicago. An award-winning technical writer, she made her fiction debut in 2004 with RIDING LESSONS, followed by FLYING CHANGES. WATER FOR ELEPHANTS is her third novel.

Ed Goldberg interviews national bestselling author Carol Casella about her recent novel, Healer, the story of one doctor’s struggle to hold her family together through a storm of broken trust and questioned ethics. Healer exposes the vulnerabilities of the American family, provoking questions of choice versus fate, desire versus need, and the duplicitous power of money. Casella's previous novel is Oxygen.

The guest is award winning writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, the author of numerous books. Her most recent book is "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster." She has made ten trips to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

Rebecca Solnit will deliver the first Sewell Lecture on Thursday, October 28th at 7pm at the First Unitarian Church Sanctuary at 1211 SW Main Street in Portland. The topic is "Altruism in the Face of Disaster."

Host Ed Goldberg interviews bestselling Seattle writer Robert Dugoni, author of "Bodily Harm," a thriller about those who profit from selling dangerous toys. When parents lose their six-year-old son to an esteemed pediatrician s seeming negligence, they turn to attorney David Sloane for justice.

In his return as "the lawyer who does not lose," Sloane is on the verge of another victory, but something about the malpractice case has bothered him from the start. And his uneasiness grows when toy designer Kyle Horgan confronts him on the way to the verdict to claim responsibility not only for the child s death but also for the fate of a second little boy in central Washington.

When the toy designer vanishes, leaving behind only a ransacked apartment, Sloane teams up with his longtime investigative partner (and former CIA operative) Charles Jenkins to reexamine the deaths and dig deeper into Horgan s claims. They are forced to enter the cutthroat world of toy manufacturing where hundreds of millions of dollars are staked on finding the next "It" product. Sloane must dodge a vicious and calculating killer, exonerate the doctor, and overcome a devastating personal loss that nearly destroys him all while keeping in check his overwhelming desire for revenge.

Host Ed Goldberg speaks with Richard Wirick, author of Kicking In, a collection of short storeis with a dark feeling. Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick’s brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether his tales are depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln or revealing a Gulf War orderly’s drift in and out of morphine dreams during an aerial Medevac surgery, Wirick’s stories are rich with the social contexts in which sedation’s acolytes emerge, come forward to flourish, and then often violently explode or fade away.

Kat Richardson is the national bestselling author of the Greywalker paranormal detective novels. Prior to success in the fiction world, Kat worked as a writer and editor in the computer industry and as a course writer for the Gemological Institute of America.

Kat is a California native with a degree in Magazine Journalism from California State University, Long Beach. She currently lives on a sailboat in Seattle.

Host Ed Goldberg speaks with Jo Nesbo, author of "The Devil's Star," a crime novel set in Oslo, Norway.

A musician, songwriter, and economist, Jo Nesbo is also one of Europe's most acclaimed crime writers. Nesbo is the winner of the Glass Key Award, northern Europe's most prestigious crime-fiction prize, for his first novel featuring Police Detective Harry Hole. The author of The Redbreast and Nemesis , he lives in Oslo.

Phillip Margolin grew up in New York City and Levittown, New York. He has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, West Africa, a junior high school teacher in the South Bronx, a law clerk for Herbert M. Schwab, the Chief Judge of the Oregon Court of Appeals and a Portland lawyer specializing in criminal defense at the trial and appellate levels. He has been writing full time since 1996.

In addition to novels, Margolin has published short stories and non-fiction articles in magazines and law journals.

Since 1996, he has been the President and Chairman of the Board of Chess for Success, a non-profit charity that uses chess to teach study skills to elementary and middle school children in Title I schools.

Comments

I've read the book twice and rather hoped to hear the program that the author spoke on the book. But that page was not available on your site. Anyway, I loved the book. I thought it was an exciting dose of history. Stoner brought the Portland of 1900 to life. There was intrigue that kept my interest throughout the book.